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Webrings--Marketing Tools or Ugly Linkware?

With the bouncy state of webring.org ownership and the ability for just about anybody to create and maintain a webring, do you find this a valid marketing tool to bring traffic to your pages, or has it become outdated waste of precious page space? Do you ever surf a webring of interest? Do you belong to any rings?

99% of webrings are a waste of time, space, you name it. Most of the time, you get Billy Bob's Personal Home Page when you enter those rings. The credible sites just don't waste their time in those things - have you ever seen a successful, popular site, or a business, use a webring? Probably not. I just think there are better ways to build traffic. Do it through link exchanges and search engines.

I entirely agree with mjames but if the ring is reputable it just might give you some targeted traffic. If the ring is topical and your site matches the topic perfectly than people will be interested in your site and just may click trough your site if they didn't find what they were looking for.

I use webrings with my wilderness site, they don't bring in alot of traffic, but around 10 uniques a day.

The rules for these rings simply state that the page the ring links to must have the ring link on it. So I made two or three pages, I think they're called ring1.php, ring2.php etc with a welcome message and the ring code on it.

Not alot of traffic, but it doesn't hurt.

I also run a topsites list on my site and I had that page join the webring as well. The topsite list does bring me in good decent traffic as well, 20-30 uniques a day.

One good side effect of these types of programs is that while you don't get a ton of traffic, there is seemingly a higher chance that a webmaster of a site similar to yours may show up. That webmaster may just add a direct link to your site, and so this could indirectly increase your link popularity.

I started a webring and I modified the webring code so that the image that it displays is a link back to my site increasing sites linking back to me. The ring I run is for writing sites so it's very specific. The sites on the list aren't very big and average 1-5 hits a day from the rings. However, since doing this the number of sites reverse linking to me has gone up in google.

Just make sure the ring is quality and very specific. I've had only 2-3 hits total of the other ring I joined. I'm about to drop that ring all together because the one I started gets me more traffic!

Thanks for all the feedback! As far as "commercial" webrings go, they are pretty rare except for the Web Graphics industry where there seems to be some fairly successful rings. I like the idea of starting a specialized ring that directs traffic back to you, but I've assisted in ring upkeep and it can just be--yucky. I don't know if it's worth the handful of hits a month, but giving it a try can't hurt.

If all the sites in the ring have equal traffic, they would be fair. Otherwise, the bottom half or more of sites would benefit from it and the top few would lose from it.

This makes the large sites want to pull out of the ring, and this is a chain reaction. Most webrings reduce to very low traffic sites only after a certain time. This is why webrings have a bad name in larger sites, and tend to be only used on personal or hobby sites.

If a webring only accepted certain sites based on their traffic, then perhaps they would be more attractive to larger sites.